Lastly, we are told to have faith in our conscience? well we know now a great deal more about conscience than formerly.  Ethnologists have studied the manifestations of conscience in different people, and do not find that they are consistent.  Conscience is now known to be partly transmitted by inheritance in the way and under the conditions clearly explained by Mr. Darwin, and partly to be an unsuspected result of early education.  The value of inherited conscience lies in its being the organised result of the social experiences of many generations, but it fails in so far as it expresses the experience of generations whose habits differed from our own.  The doctrine of evolution shows that no race can be in perfect harmony with its surroundings; the latter are continually changing, while the organism of the race hobbles after, vainly trying to overtake them.  Therefore the inherited part of conscience cannot be an infallible guide, and the acquired part of it may, under the influence of dogma, be a very bad one.  The history of fanaticism shows too clearly that this is not only a theory but a fact.  Happy the child, especially in these inquiring days, who has been taught a religion that mainly rests on the moral obligations between man and man in domestic and national life, and which, so far as it is necessarily dogmatic, rests chiefly upon the proper interpretation of facts about which there is no dispute,—­namely, on those habitual occurrences which are always open to observation, and which form the basis of so-called natural religion.

It would be instructive to make a study of the working religion of good and able men of all nations, in order to discover the real motives by which they were severally animated,—­men, I mean, who had been tried by both prosperity and adversity, and had borne the test; who, while they led lives full of interest to themselves, were beloved by their own family, noted among those with whom they had business relations for their probity and conciliatory ways, and honoured by a wider circle for their unselfish furtherance of the public good.  Such men exist of many faiths and in many races.

Another interesting and cognate inquiry would be into the motives that have sufficed to induce men who were leading happy lives, to meet death willingly at a time when they were not particularly excited.  Probably the number of instances to be found, say among Mussulmans, who are firm believers in the joys of Mahomet’s Paradise, would not be more numerous than among the Zulus, who have no belief in any paradise at all, but are influenced by martial honour and patriotism.  There is an Oriental phrase, as I have been told, that the fear of the inevitable approach of death is a European malady.

Terror at any object is quickly taught if it is taught consistently, whether the terror be reasonable or not.  There are few more stupid creatures than fish, but they notoriously soon learn to be frightened at any newly-introduced method of capture, say by an artificial fly, which, at first their comrades took greedily.  Some one fish may have seen others caught, and have learned to take fright at the fly.  Whenever he saw it again he would betray his terror by some instinctive gesture, which would be seen and understood by others, and so instruction in distrusting the fly appears to spread.